The Twittersphere, especially its right-wing, has spent the last day going absolutely nuts over a series of new revelations from WikiLeaks from the Podesta files. Mainly, they’ve been going crazy over what appears to be an insane occult conspiracy involving something called “Spirit Cooking.” But what’s the real story? What is all this about? Here’s the Break.com breakdown:

1. What are the leaks?

They are the latest (29th installment) of a series of bundles of literally thousands of emails exposed by WikiLeaks. These emails in question belonged to John Podesta. Podesta is the chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The leaks range from a few years back until this year.

2. What is Spirit Cooking?

Spirit Cooking is an artistic/esoteric concept of cooking invented by Marina Abramovic, a really weird Yugoslavian-born artist (she’s so weird, the place she was born doesn’t even exist now). Spirit Cooking sounds really harmless, even wholesome, like it was soul food or something like that. But it’s not.

Like WikiLeaks said, Spirit Cooking was an invention of Abramovic for a 1996 art installation, which had to do with the concept of recipes combining normal food, bodily fluids (including breast milk, blood, sperm, and worse), and “intentional thoughts.” You also involve your own bodies or the bodies of others, non-edible objects (in the original art project one recipe involved a ruby), and other things like movements.

Here is a video of the original “Spirit Cooking” art project:

3. What has this got to do with Hillary Clinton?

Well, like I said, John Podesta is the Hillary campaign’s head honcho. He and his brother Tony Podesta are huge players in the Establishment elite, and they’re also into some weird scenes. One of the emails released in the recent WikiLeaks dump showed Tony inviting John to come to a Spirit Cooking dinner he was holding with Abramovic herself. Abramovic has taken to doing Spirit Cooking dinners as events (I suppose the baby boomers would say “happenings”) at the homes of her rich and powerful friends.

4. What would this have looked like?

Well, here she is spirit cooking with Lady Gaga:

And there’s no real reason to think that Abramovic would be toning it down for the Podesta brothers. She doesn’t really do “toned down.”

5. Does this really have anything to do with Hillary? Does it prove she’s Satan?

First, there’s no indication that Hillary was even invited. In fact, we can’t be sure John made it to his brother’s event either (the Podestas are now claiming he didn’t). But it’s important to get that the Podesta family and the Clintons aren’t just in some kind of employee-boss relationship. They’re friends, part of a wider social circle including a large number of the East Coast elites (mostly transcending things that don’t really matter to the Establishment, like whether you pretend to be a “democrat” or pretend to be a “republican”).

In the best case scenario as far as Hillary is concerned, she had both a professional and personal (friendship) relationship with Podesta, a guy who is more than a little creepy. Not that this should surprise anyone at this point, given that she was also friend with Anthony Weiner. And that she married Bill Clinton.

In the worst case scenario, she’s also into this kind of stuff herself. It wouldn’t be surprising. Abramovic’s work is the kind of stuff that liberal elites love to get involved with because it makes them feel avant-garde and superior, and because it mocks traditional ideas and values which they consider beneath them.

Think I’m being too mean? Here’s an email from Podesta, who you’ll remember is running her freaking campaign, pointing out that Hillary hates everyday Americans.

As if it wasn’t clear enough, he literally entitled it “Truth.”

6. Okay, but is it actually Satan worship, or just weird art?

According to Abramovic, when it’s going on at a gallery or public display, it’s art. When it is done in a private home or other intimate locations, it’s “something more spiritual.”

Some of the people going nuts about this leak have pointed out that Abramovic is into the supernatural. I mean, there she is with a skeleton, right? But that could just be a part of her body-focused experimental art style. And, okay, she does look a bit like some kind of wizard here:

But that could just be a fancy look for artistic photography, right? And it’s not like she–

Okay, okay, so that’s some kind of bloody ram’s head. Seems a bit occultish. Could be a reference to baphomet, but there’s still no–

OH COME ON!

Okay, fine. She’s probably a wizard. But is she any good at it? Or just a poser?

7. But is it really occultism or just an act? Is there any real occult basis to it?

You could make some parallels between Abramovic’s Spirit Cooking and stuff from Aleister Crowley. I’ll note that Crowley is extremely popular in the former Yugoslavian states; there are probably more Thelemites (people who practice Crowley’s philosophy and style of magick) there than anywhere else in the non-English-speaking world.

But Spirit Cooking is NOT something from Thelema. It may have been inspired by Thelema. Some articles hurriedly written and sloppily researched over the last day have claimed that Spirit Cooking recipes are the “Cakes of Light” which are used in Thelemic rituals, and which they have claimed contain the same ingredients.

Now, I’m definitely a wizard, and have done more magick than most people going around dressing up in pointy hats or playing with ram’s skulls have ever dreamed of. And I’ve actually eaten Cakes of Light; and yes, they do contain blood. But not semen, or breast milk. They’re a central part of the most practiced Thelemic group-ritual in the world, the “Gnostic Mass.” They’re not drenched in blood or something like that, the point of them isn’t to shock or gross anyone out, they look like regular cookies and taste pretty much the same. If you didn’t know they had blood in them you’d never have guessed.

In other, more advanced rituals of Western sex-magic, the mixture of male and female sexual fluids, or semen with menstrual blood, are sometimes used for the making of talismans. In some rites, they are consumed. Abramovic was almost certainly inspired by all this.

The reasons for this stuff, in magick, is because a ritual that pushes your boundaries and breaks taboos has enormous power to unleash the doors of perception and change you in fundamental ways. Also, the body, blood, and sex, all have enormous power. Power to change your perception, power to direct your attention, power to alter yourself and thus to alter the reality around you.

But there is a difference: in art, the point is the external and what things look like. Abramovic may have been inspired by the occult, but her work (however shocking) seems pretty shallow to me. And if she’s really doing what she thinks of as a spiritual ritual with the Podestas, the Clintons, Lady Gaga and anyone else, I’m betting there’s very little real occultism happening there. Lots of taboo breaking, but it barely counts if the people doing it no longer consider the stuff they’re breaking to be taboo to them. It’s mainly for the people involved to show off how decadent they are; it’s all for appearance’s sake and to get off on how naughty you’re being. It may use imagery and ideas from the occult, but it’s not real magick that’s happening there.

8. But wait! I heard on Twitter about a satanic child-trafficking pedophile ring, and Clinton was in on it!

This is mainly an idea based on a mix-up of several scandals or allegations exposed about the Clintons, all being mashed up together.

So first, there’s Jeffry Epstein and his Lolita Express. Epstein was a big financier at Bear Stearns and later in his own company, and was a very close friend of the Clintons and many other big figures in the Establishment Political Elite as well as Hollywood. He was also what you could definitely call a pervert. He was eventually convicted of soliciting an underage girl (14 years old) for prostitution, and sentenced to 13 months in prison.

He would often meet socially with the Clintons, especially Bill (another secret of the Clintons is that Bill and Hillary appear to spend as little time together as possible). And he also flew his friends (including Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, as well as celebrities including Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker) on trips to exotic locations (including a five-stop trip through Asia, but also to Epstein’s private island) where they would allegedly have sex parties. It’s known from Epstein’s trial that he had apparently taken videos of some important people having sex with prostitutes (potentially underage) which he apparently planned to use as blackmail material.

Second, there was a recent WikiLeaks exposure which indicated that Hillary (while Secretary of State) may have provided assistance to a child-trafficker named Laura Silsby. Hillary was supposed to be in charge of the emergency aid to Haiti after that country suffered a devastating earthquake in 2010; as it turned out, she redirected almost all the aid money and contracts to friends and connections, including her own brother and donors to the Clinton Foundation. The Haitians despise Hillary for that.

While this was going on, Silsby went to Haiti under the pretense of being the head of a Baptist Missionary Group, and that she would open a home for Haitian orphans in the Dominican Republic. However, she was stopped at the Haitian border with 40 Haitian children, and it turned out that virtually none of them were actually orphans. It’s possible that Silsby planned to engage in some kind of child-trafficking scheme, to sell Haitian children to Western parents eager to pay a lot of money to adopt. But it might have been even worse: Silsby’s Dominican lawyer turned out to be a guy under investigation for sex trafficking in El Salvador.

In any case, Hillary was obviously informed about Silsby’s arrest by Haitian authorities. It’s not really clear that her interest went beyond what you’d expect from the US government; it’s pretty much normal in a situation like that, especially when Silsby was presenting herself and being shown by the media as being a Christian Missionary, for the government to try to get her and her people out of a Haitian prison and back to the USA. Unlike Epstein or Podesta, or the people Hillary gave millions in stolen Haitian-aid-money to, Silsby is not a part of Hillary’s longstanding inner circle.

Third, a set of WikiLeaks from the Podesta emails that mention a party that Epstein and his wife are invited to, along with Tamera Luzzatto (who was Clinton’s chief of staff when she was a senator), where there will be “entertainment provided” by three young girls in a pool.

Some people have combined these with the Abramovic Spirit Cooking stuff to suggest that Podesta was involved in black magic, child abuse sex rituals. But the Spirit Cooking dinner and this party are two totally separate events, months apart. The girls mentioned in the second email are Luzzatto’s stepson’s kids. And again, Hillary wasn’t actually on the invite list to either, though pretty much everyone going to both events are friends (some of them very close friends) of Hillary Clinton’s.

So there’s definitely some evidence of Podesta being into some weird stuff with occult overtones. But there’s no real evidence of some vast occult/satanic conspiracy involving child ritual abuse or something like that.

There’s certainly no sign that Marina Abramovic’s bizarre ritual-magic/art events would involve children in any way –